Monday, 12 November 2007
Three XC rides on one long weekend? It’s starting to sound like riding in Whistler! Jeff, Chris, Ckucke, and I hit Maunawili Ditch Trail again on Monday afternoon. It was clear and starry at 0530 when I got up, but by the afternoon, the clouds had rolled in. I would have actually liked to do maybe a Wailuna ride in the early morning, but I didn’t think anyone else was up for that. Even with the overcast sky, there were no signs of rain, so it was all good. It was crazy hot and humid again like on Saturday.
We climbed Government Road and turned off at the Ditch Trail junction. We rode out to the second inner loop trailhead and did the loop backwards. The conditions were the same as on Saturday, but maybe a little clearer from us knocking some of the deadfall sticks out of the way in our passing. We rode back to Government Road, encountering a loose black dog running on the trail in front of us. It had disappeared by the time we reached the junction. Turning right, we climbed up Government Road to the end. There were a few soft, wet spots on the climb that weren’t there on Saturday. There must have been some rain between then and Monday. We passed a pair of off-road pedestrians. They had no equipment, so they probably had walked up from the Waimanalo side when we were on the inner loop.
Reaching the top, we continued up the Demonstration Trail. The Waimanalo traverse was narrow from eroded dirt falling onto the trail from the high side. There were a couple of spooky sections that threatened high-siding us into the abyss. The Maunawili traverse was in better shape except for a few slippery roots angled to slide bikes off the trail. We took a rest break at the powerline road, then backtracked down the singletrack. We stopped briefly at the side trail I thought was the upper end of the ridge trail, but after Chris walked down it for a bit, the trail became indistinct. There was a drop-in further up the trail with orange ribbons, but it was unrideably steep and didn’t seem to go toward the ridge. Oh well… more research required. I really didn’t want to start from the bottom and work all the way up to find the upper end.
Continuing down the road, we dropped into the upper traverse and did the lower ridge trail to the lower traverse. Instead of doing the lower traverse back to Government Road, we dropped into the bowl and climbed out the other side. This route was unrideable. There were a bunch of people at the bottom of the road. A dude on an Ellsworth Truth went riding uphill past us, then a dude came walking up to retrieve an unattended, loose Pitbull. He said something to the effect that it was once his friend’s dog, but that friend had abandoned it. He was going to take the dog home. We asked him about the black dog, but it wasn’t his. We later noticed the black dog taking a rest in the shade on the roadside a little ways up from the parking area.
As we were standing around loading up the bikes, a tall dude came out of the trail with two empty 500ml water bottles sticking out of his shorts pockets. He asked to borrow a cellphone to call his wife for a pickup. I couldn’t really see from where I was parked, but he was talking about how his kid broke down crying at about mile four. When I walked around Jeff’s Trailblazer, I saw Junior sitting silently dejected on the log motorcycle trap. Someone was headed down the long road to hating daddy… They went walking off down the road after calling for extraction on Ckucke’s phone. We were jaw-jacking so long the Ellsworth dude finished the Ditch Trail to the bottom and climbed up the road back to the parking area.
More pictures here.
D = 5.98-miles (9.62 km), Vavr = 5.8 mph (9.3 kph), Vmax = 22.4 mph (36.0 kph), T = 1-hour, 1-minute
you forgot about carzy dad with no cell phone and his tired son. Good ride!
Oops! fixed.